Do you remember the first time you experienced a non-traditional approach to learning? For most of us, we didn’t learn important life-lessons inside a classroom. For Jennifer Hofmann, classic Saturday morning programming introduced her to self-paced learning, and the rest, as they say, was history.

What do you know about the changing demographics of the United States? Pew Research Center found that, “Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past, and the U.S. is projected to be even more diverse in the coming decades.” With the U.S. becoming more diverse, and with this shift in the population demographic, comes the need to diversify learning solutions.

As L&D practitioners, the demands of our job now require us to not just expect different faces in the room, but learners with different needs and abilities, both in person and online. The popularity of blended learning has increased exponentially over the years and is now being heralded as one of the most cost-effective ways to distribute information and impact behaviors across organizations.

How can you ensure your blended learning strategy meets these diversity demands?

When we begin creating eLearning or video elements for blended learning, our first thought often includes technology. We invest in platforms to create high-end designs. The polish usually ends there. When it comes to adding narration to our finished products, we turn to someone in the learning department and call it a day. This, Marie Hoffman argues, does a disserve to our learners and our instructional designs.

The term blended learning has come in and out of vogue in corporate training for the last several decades. For so long, in fact, it feels like an old-fashioned term. A term that is not modern enough for the current learning landscape.

"…modern blended learning is more than sequencing different media and activities that happen to be related by topic. It is about aligning learning objects with the most appropriate instructional strategies, techniques, and technologies, while meeting the needs of the organization and modern learners."

So your organization has made blended learning a priority. But while you know you need to move your training programs into the future, you wonder how doing so will affect learning results. And though some of you have tried blended learning before, the programs didn’t meet your expectations and you worry about trying again.

A strategic plan quells these fears and improves the likelihood of program success. Get started with Jennifer Hofmann’s exclusive blended learning instructional design and implementation model: Campaign Blueprints.

eLearning has been a viable training option for a while now. Thanks to tools like GoAnimate and Camtasia, instructional designers can quickly and easily produce a high-quality learning product. But just because we have access to technical tools, that doesn’t automatically result in a seamless creation process.

Creating effective, dynamic training programs requires an involved process, including a multi-layered approach that asks a variety of questions including: How do we ensure our training has an impact during both formal and informal moments of learning need? What is an instructional strategy? How does EdTech influence our designs?

At a loss for how to get started? Fear not! Meet Donna Designer, InSync Training’s Instructional Design Superhero!

The future of learning has arrived! With virtual reality, gamification, and microlearning, we now have access to a wide variety of strategies, techniques, and technologies when creating our blended learning programs. But how do we make sense of all the options and engage our learners, while also addressing their individual needs?

Jennifer Hofmann explored and defined the future of instructional design during her recent Virtually There learning event. In this blog post, we will explore three key elements: learning hubs, learning campaigns, and learning paths.

In a recent blog post, we described modern blended learning as the realization of a harmonic balance of instructional, technical, organizational, and delivery components in support of learner engagement and achievement.

In order to find and establish that harmonic balance, we need to start with our learning objectives, consider where, when, and how our learners are learning, and then determine the best way to deliver that learning.